


House of Lalonde

by deadthing



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-23 17:57:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1574492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deadthing/pseuds/deadthing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She leaned in, as though for a kiss, but inhaled and added softly, "you're going to be sick. I can smell it on your breath." I pulled my legs over the ledge, keeled over, and was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. preface

"You're going to miss it here, Potsdam is cold as balls in the winter."  
I took a shameless drag on my e-cig. Neither of us smoked for real anymore because it would fuck up her nose.  
"The town doesn't exist."  
"I've been to Potsdam." She crossed her legs under the safety rail. "It exists and it's cold as balls."  
"House ain't in Potsdam, it's on Placid."  
"I don't know where that is."  
"Lake Placid. The town the house is listed in doesn't come up on google maps." She ran greasy fingers through her hair. I swallowed slowly and felt it go down my throat. The wind could be buffeting up here. Absolutely vicious. Sixty miles an hour, but tonight it was still. Looking just at her I forgot we were outside. There wasn't a single strand of hair playing over her face, and her unseeing eyes were pitched a little behind me in that eerie way that might have made me glance over my shoulder if I didn't know she was blind. She uncrossed her legs.  
"Deep breaths, Dave." There was a knot in my stomach the size of a fucking softball. I had come up here to relax, but instead, my guts were squirming. My every thought was visceral. She leaned in, as though for a kiss, but inhaled and added softly, " you're going to be sick. I can smell it on your breath." I pulled my legs over the ledge, keeled over, and was.

T-minus two days and counting. Everything was in boxes. Terezi had lent me most of them. There were things I needed to leave behind, not for lack of space, but for my own peace. Most of my bro's old stuff had already been sold on ebay to cover pocket expenses for the trip. Other shit was just too big to deal with. The keyboard had been ditched first. I figured the place might have a dusty old baby grand, and I wouldn't use a keyboard anyway. I had ended up leaving the big flat screen too. After some deliberation, I had dismantled the turntables and packed them.  
I dialed Terezi's landline. She picked up after only one ring.  
"Hey, coolkid."  
"Thith ith Thollux."  
"Nice one, Dave! You might have actually fooled me if you weren't the only one who doesn't call my cell phone. Please call it from now on."  
"You've been drafted into the excavation team. We need to clean out box city."  
"I'll be up in ten minutes. Limeade or Arnold Palmer?"  
"I'll take the liquidized old fart on the rocks. How did you know I harbor a craving for human flesh?" She snorted on the other end. "Hey, have you got apple juice?"

The girl was nothing if not punctual. At precisely six twenty-nine, the elevator dinged, and at six thirty, I heard the rap on my door. She was holding her cane in one hand and an entire Randalls bag full of shit food in the other.  
"D'you bring apple juice?"  
"Rude, Dave! Don't I even get a hello?"  
"'Sup, hey, are those dou'ssants?" They were. She'd picked up two boxes of the in-famed and irresistible little doughnut-croissant hybrids. A box for today and one for the road tomorrow. TZ was the best. I unscrewed the lid from the half-gallon bottle of Mott's and took a few hearty chugs before exhaling loudly ("ahhh,") and wiping my mouth on my sleeve.  
"Dave, that was so gross," she muttered, taking the jug back. She then swiftly proceeded to invalidate her statement by licking the excess drool from the rim. I was going to miss that crazy bitch more than anything.  
We spent about two hours hauling important stuff into the elevator. U-Haul was coming tomorrow. Last month, I'd actually gone with an old family friend to the luxury dealership and dive-bombed ass-first into bro's assets. Man was I going to look stupid with a U-Haul latched onto the back of a V8 Dodge Charger. Bro's agent had been fantastic. Worked out all the inheritance and the nasty pile of paperwork that came with it. And then the Essex county government contacted me through Bro's work line. The family on my mom's side had owned this house way in upstate New York for literal centuries. I'm not gonna lie, at the time I found out, I actually had to ask Siri when America was settled. My relatives, to the best of my knowledge, had been hoity-toity dutchmen in pantaloons, buying up land on grants from the king. They'd built the foundations for a house that was eventually renovated by Frank Lloyd Wright himself. All I really knew about the estate was that it was a summer home before the twenties when a couple of stuffy aunts lived in there. Bro never talked about it.  
Immediately after the accident, I knew I couldn't live in Houston anymore. The only friends there, Terezi and Sollux, were headed to college next year, and I really needed to take a year off. I figured since I already technically owned the estate, I could spend at least the summer there and work on my photography. It was more the urgent need to clean out the penthouse and stop seeing Bro's old stuff lying around, then that I actually needed to leave the state. It was all part of it.  
I had fallen asleep. Terezi was nudging me. "Dave, all the stuff's downstairs. You wanna crash at my place?" I nodded.  
"You packed the dou'ssants?" She nudged me hard.

I'd slept in Terezi's bed at least three times before. She snored like a fucking troll. Still, she was a pointy little hotbox and I felt safer than I had in months lying next to her. The sounds of faint sirens and mufflers and horns were comforting in the weirdest way, and in the summer, she kept the windows open which sent just the glimmer of light I needed to watch her skinny chest rise and fall in the dark. I think that was the last moment I remember feeling really truly content. I took her sweaty hand and her fingers curled around mine in sleep, finger pads to scraped raw knuckles. Our dirty fingernails, our mingling sweat, the way the heat rose from her, and the blood-red sky, and every inch of tarry pavement in the city, thick like smoke, and she drifted slowly into my dreams.


	2. the boy in the mirror

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 91 years ago and 1,700 miles away.

The most merciful thing in the world, I am led to believe, is the ability of the human mind to find comfort in the inherent patterns and forces of change. Perhaps in fact, it is those patterns, laid forth by the very nature of existence, and expressed so by every facet of physicality in a way that really is quite tangible, that allow for the progression and self-perpetuation of the mechanism of time. One must imagine it difficult to judge such without the universal tugging of tide and waning of moon. Both Mother and I have been possessed of late, or enchanted by the celestial bodies and those consonant patterns with which they gallivant most purposefully through the heavens. She more than I, to the extent which she hired a team of scientists and architects to design and erect an astronomical observatory about the old family estate up in the mountains. Mr Frank Lloyd Wright, the renown mastermind of Prairie School architecture, had been commissioned to reconstruct both interior and exterior, which had originally been designed in the English baroque style of the day. Mother and I were to reside, beginning the sixteenth of July, in the fully staffed manor, where we were to conduct joint research on nearby nebulae, thought to be 'island universes', or of some similarly esoteric sort.

On the eve of the nineteenth, I typewrote a letter to my local distributor of Weird Tales magazine, requesting my subscription be forwarded to my new address, and hand wrote, in elegant purple ink, a formal letter to my dear friend John with whom I planned to spend the better part of the evening. He was to read the contents after my departure. Though quite a cake-eater, John was both amiable and grounding, which I'll admit right away, are traits I do not possess. I would miss him as was certain, but he was in possession of an automobile and a cordial invitation to visit me at the Rainbow Falls estate whenever our respective schedules should permit it. 

Presently, I combed hair tonic, a thick gob of the product, through my bobbed locks with a quaint little art nouveau piece and aid of my fingertips. I had tried vainly in the past to water wave my hair, but the curls never held. I fancied my hair boyish and quite sleek. After trials and tribulations regarding my hair, I applied cat eyed liner, rouge, and dark lipstick. There was no real need to dress anything more than casual in John's company, but tonight would determine how he would remember me, and I would be dolled up or caught dead. I was in ownership of several House of Lanvin pieces, imported from France at much cost to my mother. I reasoned tonight a good opportunity to debut my embroidered evening ensemble. John would fall head-over-heals.

It was a bit over an hour by automobile from Sands Point to the upper east side. I passed the time with my latest issue of Home Brew magazine. Certainly I read the contemporaries, the classics, the best sellers. Gertrude Atherton was a personal favorite, though the works of Bronte and Austen were unsurpassed in my mind. But I harbored a special taste for the eldritch tales of H.P. Lovecraft. The Lurking Fear, which I finished just footsteps outside John's apartment, was a thriller like no other. I longed for the next serial installment by my favorite young author.

John's father greeted my mother and myself ("Roxanne, Rose darling! John's just in the parlor. I made meringue, it will be up shortly.") in the lobby, and we took the lift to the top floor. John was, as was foretold, playing a hand of solitaire on the coffee table. Upon my entry, he immediately gathered the cards, eyes twinkling.  
"Pick a card!" I selected a facedown card from the fanned deck.  
"Now look at your card, but don't show me." I smiled and he grinned right back. "Ace of diamonds! Try it again!" I did.  
"Six of hearts. Hey Rose, I read in a magazine that you can use cards to predict the future."  
"John dear, the cards in question would be of the tarot variety."  
"Happen to have a deck?"  
"Have you a martini cocktail?"  
"I'll be right back," he said, still beaming as he turned about and strode down the corridor. I busied myself leafing through a copy of Vanity Fair, spread on the table. The windows facing Central Park east spilled the light of the setting sun over the spread, framing small block text in warm patches of illumination. The swirling Art Deco fenestration cast vein-like shadows over my hands, which glowed gold as the glass of shop displays in midsummer. John returned, and the light played in his hair as well, washing over locks like an ocean as he strode, two shimmering glasses in hand. He sat snugly next to me in a single fluid motion, and handed me a drink. The quiet reverberations of the voices of mother and John's father provided white noise, synthesized with the bustle of foot and auto traffic below. I was vaguely conscious of the scuttling steps of some small mammalian creature behind the thinly primed and stained plaster. I absently swirled the drink.  
"John, would you humor me but for a moment, and reassure me I should return here to visit."  
"You said I could come and see you at any time, right? I can drive up and you'll give me the grand tour of the laboratories."  
I turned to face him, and he must have sensed some aspect of forlorn in my face square on.  
"Runnin' Wild opens on Broadway in October. I'll buy two tickets if you'd do me the honor." I felt myself smile. John was a notably seasoned connoisseur of terrible musical productions. It would no doubt be a miserable show.  
"The honor would be mine."  
The remainder of the evening was passed in a pleasantly hoary-eyed stupor in which John and I giggled over frivolities and reminisced. The sun set over the continent before I stumbled back over the threshold, having gifted John his parcel. In our last moment of peace, alone in the whitewashed corridor, he shook my hand, pat me on the back in a clumsy hugging motion, and kissed me quickly and awkwardly on the cheek. I faced him squarely as before, raised my hand under his chin, pulled his flushed face into mine and kissed his lips gently.

Early the morning of the sixteenth, mother packed the boot with her most precious scientific equipment, a spare change of clothes and toiletries in neat little matched bags. Though a chauffeur had been at call, mother absolutely insisted on taking responsibility for her own crocked self, and hopped behind the steering wheel with her own brand of maniac enthusiasm. Despite the broiling heat and my pounding headache, I found it in me to dress and collect the last belongings that had not been shipped by world-class freight. My darling kitten Jaspers was loaded into a carrier and belted into the seat shotgun my mother. I sprawled myself out across the back seats of mother's auto and hummed quietly as the motor sputtered into accompaniment. A rather daunting, leather-bound tomb of a read was nestled in next to me, to be savored through the golden peak of summer at my new residence. My own equipment, of far less scientific notions, was packed in a velvet satchel at my feet. As the light beamed down through tinted glass, I dozed into a comfortable light sleep. 

A sharply-dressed butler greeted us at the gate of the drive near midnight, and helped me clumsily out the door. I could not make out any feature of the house in the dark with my bleary eyes, and relied on mother and the butler to lead me inside. Other members of manorial staff unloaded the automobile, as betrayed by Jaspers' anxious mewling. As electric lights were flicked on, I resigned to squinting against the harshness, and begging the butler to turn them back off as he led me to what was to be my own wing. I thanked him graciously as he gestured down a dim corridor toward my private apartments, and he bowed his head, referring to me as Ms Lalonde and formally welcoming me home. Tomorrow I would take the grand tour. The butler, who had introduced himself as Scratch, politely departed, and I neared the end of the corridor to be confronted suddenly by a young man. Epicene and fair, as best I could judge in the dim light, he sported startling red eyes, or at least, I believed he had until I blinked and they matched my own deep lavender. The veininess of his lean hands vanished as though it had been an illusion of shadows, and I realized there had been no young man in the first place, but rather my tired reflection in an elegant looking glass. I turned into my bedroom, where a maid was standing at call and my immense, plush, down-laden bed was ready.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> indeed this is now, as deliberately and initially planned, a split narrative. please feel free to leave comments, as feedback of any kind is encouraging and will expedite the writing process.

**Author's Note:**

> first chapter in line for an au I've been meaning to write. Not technically my first fic, but my first in a while. the plot is heavily inspired by and loosely based on the rats in the walls by hp lovecraft.


End file.
